


Keeping Space

by rowofstars



Category: Doctor Who (2005)
Genre: Angst, F/M, Introspection
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-08-15
Updated: 2010-08-15
Packaged: 2018-04-18 09:36:33
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 935
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4701116
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rowofstars/pseuds/rowofstars
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There is a space around him and inside him, that only she can fill.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Keeping Space

**Author's Note:**

> Written for challenge 46 at [](http://then-theres-us.livejournal.com/profile)[then_theres_us](http://then-theres-us.livejournal.com/). Thanks to [](http://stillxmyxheart.livejournal.com/profile)[stillxmyxheart](http://stillxmyxheart.livejournal.com/) for the 11th hour beta. One of these days I need to stop doing that to you. ;)

_He could build a city. Has a certain capacity. There's a niche in his chest_  
where a heart would fit perfectly  
and he thinks if he could just maneuver one into place—  
well then, game over.

 

 

* * *

 

 

There is a space he keeps, between himself and the beautifully violent anarchy of the universe.

It’s a buffer he reinforces every day, every time he lifts his leather jacket off the hook by the door. He wears it like a suit of armor, made of metaphor instead of metal. If he can’t feel things touching his skin then it keeps things from getting too close.

Nothing can ever get close again.

 

 

* * *

 

 

He goes back only once, to make sure the time lock will hold, but he focuses solely on the readings on the monitor. He doesn’t dare look at anything else. The dust of his sins hasn’t even settled before he’s off, jumping between centuries and systems, never staying long, never waiting to watch the fallout.

He’s been wearing his armor for so long now he doesn’t know how to breathe without feeling the press of it folding around his body. Someday it will make a martyr of him; he’s seen it enough in the timelines weaving around him. It weighs on his mind constantly, maybe even on his very soul, if he believed in such things as souls and gods and heaven.

But these things burned away on a planet with trees of silver music and an orange sky.

He’s become complacent and accepting of endings where not everyone lives. There is no place for the intangibles anymore. He believes only in what he confirms with any or all of his senses. He is a scientist and a soldier, an explorer and a survivor.

He is an alien denying his own humanity.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Then Rose smiles at him, poking her tongue through her teeth just so, the light in her brown eyes sparkling as he whisks her on to the next great adventure.

His armor dents.

She grabs his hand, running alongside him as fast as her human legs will allow, and his armor cracks. He trips over her shoe in the console room. Snatching it off the grating he spins on his heel to admonish her only to find her asleep, curled into the crease of the pilot’s seat with a book hanging limply from her hand. The corner of his mouth curls as he steps forward, slipping the book from her hand and covering her with his jacket.

She invades the space around him as he works on the TARDIS, as he makes tea, as he saves lives and finishes genius level four-dimensional crossword puzzles from the thirty-second century, and bits of his armor are falling off around him.

His life isn’t his own anymore. She’s a stupid ape no different than any other stupid ape except that she saved him from himself. He said run and she didn’t ask where to, she just did. She’s blonde and brilliant, and when she smiles it makes him remember why it’s better with two. She doesn’t ask for the little bits of him that he gives up, but he breaks them off and slides them under her door like secrets.

 

 

* * *

 

 

Then the moment comes where he finally has to choose between her and the Earth, her life or six billion, and he can’t. There is no choice, there never was, and he knows it. Under any previous circumstance it would have been done and over with, the Slitheen family a distant memory in a hollow crater that used to be Number Ten. She makes the decision for him. She doesn’t even hesitate.

His armor is a tattered shell.

Hours later, she’s safe, the Earth is safe and the whole thing is branded one big hoax, just the way he likes it. Except now something has shifted between them and into the space he so carefully arranges. He cares and she knows. What’s worse yet is she cares just as much and yet she’s still willing to take the risks and do the right thing.

It’s very him.

There’s an awkward phone call and he hopes he wasn’t so obvious bribing her with a plasma storm and the promise of the unknown. He already used up his best line when he told her it also travels in time. The shockwave won’t really be that big and he’ll have to fake it a little to be impressive. He wants to be impressive for her, just as he wants it to be enough to pull her away from home again. He even offers up a spot to Mickey so she can’t use him as an excuse, knowing full well the answer would be no. He only takes the best, and he’s already got her.

 

 

* * *

 

 

When she comes out that night, all packed up and ready for a long haul of adventures, it’s all he can do to hold back his elation. She gleefully says he’s stuck with her and he can think of nothing better. She chooses him over everything else. He knows he will always do the same.

Later, after the storm, after they land in the year two million and forty-two on a moon made of actual cheese, he watches her sleep. Her hair spills over his arm and chest, fluttering as she exhales. Love, he knows from experience, hurts. It will leave him battered and broken, twisting in the wind. It’s just so hard to care about that when her hand fits so perfectly in his.

There is a space he keeps, in his hearts, just for her.  



End file.
